Abstract

This study examined the durational patterns of English production by Chinese learners of English. The same production experiment of Mochizuki-Sudo and Kiritani (J. Phonet. 19, 231–248) was conducted to investigate how Chinese speakers of English control the durational properties of inter-stressed intervals (ISIs) and target stressed vowels by compressing the stressed vowels when unstressed syllables are added. Five male and three female English non-proficient Chinese speakers of the northeast dialect participated in the study. They were all recruited from Changchun city in Jilin province of China. They graduated from the same high school, and they did not have any experience of oversea study in any English speaking country. Durations of the ISIs and the target vowel were analyzed. The tentative analysis revealed that the ISI durations produced by the non-proficient Chinese learners of English showed the similar durational patterns like the non-proficient Japanese learners of English did in Mochizuki-Sudo and Kiritani (1991). The analysis of stressed vowel durations showed that when they produced the vowel durations, they didn’t show the similar durational patterns like the non-proficient Japanese, but those to the American speakers. The implications from the results will be discussed in the paper. [Work supported by JSPS.]